I have been battling deer in our orchard and vegetable garden for the past few years. The four legged monsters will sneak into our orchard and eat all the growth off of my young fruit trees, consume squash plants down to the base and don’t get me going on the sweet potato vines! I’ve tried numerous organic deterrents including plantskydd, ivory soap slivers and motion sensing lighting. The plantskydd worked OK but I still saw plenty of deer hits even when it was applied.

Beekeeping has proven to be a ton of fun. It’s not just fun, it’s also very rewarding. Fresh honey, helping bees prosper and did I mention fresh chemical free honey?!? This past week while touring the orchard I saw one of the coolest pictures of my life:
I like to call this hanging on by a bee. :) Trademark pending.

Two years ago I watched the amazing back to eden documentary. The authors discussed the benefits of wood chips and how they enhance the soil. The results in the video were amazing so I decided to implement something similar in our orchard. Prior to starting our orchard was filled with a mixture of weeds, clover and various types of grass. If I just put down wood chips everything would just grow right back through and I would have a massive mess.

I previously wrote about our amazing results growing peppers in a sub-irrigated raised bed. This year we decided to dedicate our second sub-irrigated raised bed to sauce tomatoes and our results were better than I could have ever expected. We planted a combination of San Marzano, Amish Paste, Speckled Roman and Romas. The plants grew like mad and by mid summer we had a tomato jungle:
Our tomato jungle wasn’t just a bunch of green vegetation either!

This past summer was our second time growing peppers in our sub-irrigated raised beds. This method of growing peppers isn’t awesome. It isn’t magnificent. It is an ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE way of growing delicious capsaicin filled peppers as well as bells and pimentos. Our first year we tried to mix peppers and tomatoes in a 12x4 sub-irrigated bed:
That was a mistake. Tomatoes need a lot of space and even with constant pruning the tomatoes eventually started shading out the peppers.

I came across a link to the Tomato Fest website a few months back. I’ve spent quite a bit of time perusing their collection and trying to find tomato varieties that will work well in our area. I’m specifically trying to find varieties that have been bred to deal with the hot humid summers we have, and the blight that comes with those conditions. Last year we had to do a fair amount of pruning to protect our tomatoes from blight, and I’m hoping I can find a few varieties that won’t require so much babying.

For several years I’ve been using Earthboxes to grow annual vegetables (beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, etc.). I’ve had fantastic results and I wanted to bring this amazing growing method to two of my raised beds. The concept behind sub-irrigated beds is pretty simple. Water is added to a reservoir in the bottom of a container through a fill tube and a peat-based planting medium is used to wick water up to the plants.

Being outdoors is an incredible experience and I love to take in nature. I love watching bees collect nectar and pollen, birds searching for worms and trees blowing gently in the wind. One of my favorite places to watch this phenomenon is our small home orchard. To make this experience even more amazing I treated myself to a Lakeland Mills log swing this past spring. It went together like clockwork and after a couple coats of stain I’m LOVING it:

In my quest to build a homestead on a budget I’m always looking to re-purpose stuff. Several months ago on our way home from dinner we saw the remains of a tree our neighbors had cut down. The tree was hollowed out at the base and I thought it would make an awesome flower pot. So we tossed the stump into our trunk and took it home.
The next day after inspecting it I noticed that the insides were filled with some nasty gik.